Health Ministry partner with Skill India to train street vendors

Taking a step towards making food safer, the Union Health Ministry will partner with the Skill India initiative to train dedicated personnel for food safety.

This new initiative will focus on mass training programmes for small and petty food businesses like street food vendors, fruits and vegetable vendors and others in partnership with Skill India and these efforts will be sustained through corporate participation, a senior health ministry official said.

For this initiative, the health ministry has partnered with the Skill Development Ministry which pilots the Skill India Mission, the official said.

The new initiative is specially aimed at nuclear families since there is nobody to pass on the wisdom to the next generation about the best pratices in food and nutrition, he said.

The FSSAI has already come out with a programme to train 23,000 street food vendors in Delhi.

Agrawal said that all these initiatives have been developed collaboratively over the past few months along with other stakeholders and partners.

“States would be facilitated to implement them on pilot basis over the next few months and thereafter national roll out of these initiatives would be done possibly by next year,” Agarwal said.

Noting that food safety is an important health and economic issue, Union Health Minister J. P. Nadda said: “Provisions of safe food should become a part of ingrained culture in our country”.

He said the adoption of global food safety standards would boost exports of agro-products and also provide better returns to farmers for their produce.